"I was really surprised," says the choreographer Wayne McGregor, of the moment when he learned he was to be awarded a CBE in the New Year honours list. "It was a real thrill. And it made me smile, a bit." The award was made in recognition of McGregor's outstanding services to dance, a field in which, in the past decade, he has become a world leader. He is choreographer-in-residence at the Royal Ballet, for whom he has produced a series of striking and critically acclaimed new works, and his own company, Wayne McGregor Random Dance, has an international reputation for cutting-edge performance. For the shaven-headed, gold-earringed choreographer, described by the New York Times as "the closest thing to a rock star that ballet can currently claim", it's been quite a journey. From being an outsider in his chosen field, itself an outsider discipline, McGregor is now a Commander of the British Empire. That he permits himself that smile is understandable.

McGregor, now 40, grew up in an "utterly stable, utterly normal" home in Cheshire, a fan of disco and the films of John Travolta. In 1991 he left Leeds University with a first class degree in dance, and after further training in New York secured a job with Redbridge council as dance co-ordinator, in which capacity, he remembers, "I organised tea dances on Wednesday afternoons". In 1992, having formed Random Dance, he choreographed a piece called Xeno, which was shown at the Place (the London School of Contemporary Dance). Just walking into the building, he remembers, was intimidating. "It was this holy of holies, and having come up the community dance route I wasn't part of that world at all."

The Place took up Xeno, toured it through Europe, and on his return invited McGregor to become a choreographer-in-residence. He was the first such appointee not to have been trained there, and this, he says, was "a very big deal for them. In five years I was never asked to teach, never asked to make a piece with the students. I was considered too dysfunctional." It wasn't until 1995, with a piece called Cyborg, that the dance world started to take serious notice of McGregor's work. Cyborg was his first foray into new-tech dance, a style which he would make wholly his own. Marrying the sinuosity of contemporary dance to a fractured postmodernism, the McGregor style was distinguished by its rattlesnake speed, flickering detail, and extreme and often distorted physical articulation. In it, you could see vestigial flashes of disco, techno, hip-hop and martial arts, as well as an echo of the work of post-structuralist choreographers like William Forsythe. Intensely zeitgeist-aware, McGregor borrowed from every area of exploration and practice. Computer technology, film theory, medicine, architecture; nothing was too arcane, or apparently distant from dance, to escape his questioning, magpie eye.

In the years that followed, Random Dance became McGregor's physical laboratory. Increasingly fascinated by the field of cognitive theory and its application to choreography, he undertook research projects with scientists at Cambridge University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of San Diego. Audience and critical reactions were mixed. Some found the resultant works abstruse and alienating, but others celebrated McGregor's brave new dance-world, and the awards and the commissions mounted.

By the new millennium, McGregor was working with the Royal Ballet, enjoying "the extremity of line, the conformity, the detail, the precision" of the classically trained dancers, and expanding his movement vocabulary accordingly.

His first main-stage work at Covent Garden was Chroma, in 2006, danced to a combination of original compositions by Joby Talbot and arrangements of music by Jack White of the White Stripes, and set in an all-white box of light by the minimalist architect John Pawson. The work presented the Royal Ballet's dancers in a strange, stark new context, and proved so successful that McGregor was invited by artistic director Monica Mason to be choreographer-in-residence with the company. Two further works for the Royal Ballet followed, Infra in 2008 and Limen in 2009, by which time he had also undertaken commissions for, among others, the Paris Opera Ballet, the San Francisco Ballet, La Scala Milan, English National Ballet, Stuttgart Ballet and Australian Ballet. In 2010, with the dark and ambiguous Outliers, he added the New York City Ballet to the list.

If the past few years have been busy, this year threatens to be even more so. January sees the Los Angeles and Moscow premieres of a work composed around the extraordinary talents of the Bolshoi wonderchild Natalia Osipova. "She's amazing," enthuses McGregor. "She's done very little contemporary work but took to it like a duck to water." In London, meanwhile, anticipation is building around a new Royal Ballet piece which launches in May. It will be danced to Michael Tippett's Fantasia Concertante on a Theme of Corelli, with designs by the artist John Gerrard, who creates virtual reality landscapes. The theme, McGregor says, is anti-war, echoing Tippett's pacifism, and will align the English pastorale of the music with a desolate wasteland of Gerrard's creation, based on an army-training area in Kenya.

In June a new full-evening McGregor work for Paris Opera Ballet opens at the Bastille. Designed by John Pawson, who will divide the stage into a series of triptychs, the piece is about the painter Francis Bacon, and given McGregor's unsparing eye and predilection for the physically extreme, this would seem a perfect match of artist and subject. The score, by Mark-Anthony Turnage, is for a contemporary ensemble with jazz musicians. "Bacon loved jazz," McGregor reflects. "And the way he situates the body in space absolutely resonates for me."

The choreographer's commitments stretch into the future. In July McGregor is hosting a Sundance Institute Theatre Lab at a workspace he has created in Lamu, East Africa, and in November, at Sadler's Wells in London, he is directing Turnage's chamber opera Twice Through the Heart with designs by the artist Mark Wallinger. In 2012 he will be directing the Big Dance, a London-based community project, while commissions for 2013 include a new Rite of Spring for the Bolshoi Ballet. All of it, says McGregor, is part of his long-term aim "to place dance in the real world. I've always been ambitious for dance, and this CBE makes that visible."

Senior dance-world figures agree. "I am so thrilled for Wayne and feel that this honour is richly deserved," says Monica Mason, and Alistair Spalding, artistic director of Sadler's Wells, echoes her words: "Wayne's radical approach to the creation of dance is absolutely essential to the future of the art form, so I am very glad that he has achieved such wide recognition." All of which raises a very serious question: is McGregor now an establishment insider? He laughs. "I hope not," he says, "I really hope not."